


Curtain Call

by intothecest



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Especially the third part of a trilogy, F/M, No Smut, Post-Gravity Falls, Sequels always suck, Sibling Incest, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Valentine's Day, pinecest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 12:01:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17787020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothecest/pseuds/intothecest
Summary: Dipper and Mabel have spent a long Valentine's Day night together... watching monster movies in defiance of Valentine's Day.  It's been a great time, but the evening's over.  But there's still time for things to turn a little uncomfortable.





	Curtain Call

**Author's Note:**

> Final part in the loose trilogy that began in [Rehearsal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17765186) and continued in [Showtime](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17780519) although it could be read as a stand-alone.

The gray lumpy monster writhed as the flames engulfed it. Men circled it, mostly soldiers, a few scientists, and a plucky civilian. All were wearing bright yellow hazardous material suits, but you could see through the clear plastic face plates, they were watching with satisfaction. 

It fell to the ground, and soon was still, except for a few still-burning embers and a lot of smoke. One of the men, a grizzled white-haired soldier, took off the mask part of his suit, and inhaled deeply. “I think that’s the last of them…” he said.

A surprisingly handsome scientist removed his own mask, and looked down on the smouldering remains. “We can only hope you’re right… this plan… it didn’t have… _mushroom_ for error.”

The soldier stared at him. “Seriously? Twelve people _died_ … including my _wife_! And you’re making _puns_?" He shook his head and started walking off. 

"Why not? Learn to take a joke!”

“Too soon, man. Too soon.”

“Oh, come on… I thought you were a _fungi_!”

The credits started rolling… but after the first few, they suddenly cut to a scene in the middle of the forest, a raccoon, going about its normal business, except it's completely covered… in mushrooms.

Dipper, lying in bed watching, rolled his eyes at the inevitable setup for a sequel. “That was dumb. That whole movie would have been over in five minutes if somebody just thought to use fire the first time they saw one, instead of only figuring it out at the end…" He turned to look at Mabel, her eyes closed. "Mabel?” he said softly, not even sure if he wanted to wake her.

“I’m just resting my eyes a second.” They snapped open. “Okay, I might have drifted off a little… when did we get to the curtain call?”

“Curtain call? You mean the credits?”

“Yeah, that’s the curtain call of the movie world. One last chance for everybody to shine. Anyway, the last I remember was them burning the mushroom house. Did I miss anything important?”

“Not really,” he said. One of the mushroom creatures escaped and they had to chase it down, but the movie was pretty much over when they realized fire killed them. “I guess I don’t blame you for dozing off… it _is_ getting pretty late, and that movie sucked so much…”

“It wasn’t _that_ bad,” Mabel said. “But we should have watched the third one, instead.”

He turned back towards her. “What? The rule was no sequels. And third parts are _never_ as good as the first two, so, this would be worse than… than that. You couldn’t even stay awake through the whole thing.”

“But the third one has Patton Edwardson playing the pizza boy with the girlfriend who’s allergic to mushrooms. I’d have stayed awake for _that_.”

Dipper rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. I don’t see what the big appeal is with him, he’s not even a good actor.”

“Don’t be a hater, Dipper. He’s dreamy and you know it.”

He grinned, unable to help himself from teasing her a little. “That’s pretty superficial, isn’t it?”

“Like guys have room to talk, you’ll watch anything with a pair of boobs in it.”

She said boobs… which meant Dipper automatically looked at hers, and then snapped his head away before she noticed. He was getting far too much practice with that reflex, but so far he hadn’t screwed up in any obvious way. Instead of looking at her, he looked back at the screen, where the credits rolled… they were on to the names in the 2nd Unit. “Not _all_ guys." There were those guys who liked some kind of plot… of course, boobs did make a plot better. 

"Please, I saw you while we were watching _Bikini Beach Brainsuckers_! That gratuitous volleyball scene might as well have been…" She yawned, and yet didn’t stop talking, so she finished her thought but with an unintelligible mumble, the meaning obliterated.

He really had no defense to that, except that it didn’t seem that gratuitous while it was going on. Sure, it had nothing to do with the brainsuckers that lived in the lake, but how was he to _know_ unless he watched it very _very_ carefully? Mabel’s yawn gave him an out for discussing it. "Maybe it’s time we call it a night,” he said. Even though he didn’t want to, he had to admit he was also getting tired. If they tried to watch another movie, he might fall asleep in the middle too.

Though, there were worse ways to spend a night than falling asleep with his sister beside him. He might even prefer it, except that he couldn’t find a way to suggest it that didn’t, in his head, sound creepy. Besides, it could get awkward. What if he grabbed Mabel in his sleep and held her tight? Sometimes he’d woke up that way… although not holding a girl, of course, but rather a pillow that fit in his arms a little like one. It could get awkward… especially when the morning wood struck.

“No, not yet. We have one little bit of business to take care of…" He looked back at her, waiting for her to explain. "We have to give our monster analysis, Professor Dippingsauce.”

Another smile broke out on his face. “Of course, what was I thinking?" Dipper pushed himself off his lying down position and came to a seat beside Mabel, then adjusted the camera, and set it to record video. They’d been making these after every movie, and even talked about putting it out on a video sharing site, but he hadn’t actually posted any of them yet. Better to have a second look at them when he was more able to judge about whether it made him look too dorky. Also, he needed time to add in graphics, which probably was _itself_ too dorky, but at least in a way he was comfortable with. He cleared his throat. "This is Professor Dippingsauce…”

“… and Doctor Mabelton,” his sister jumped in, without even needing a pause, they were in synch that way. 

“And today we’re reviewing the Myconoid.”

“Myconoid?” Mabel asked. “What the hey? Did I sleep through a _whole_ movie? I thought we were doing the Mushroom Men.”

“We are. The Myconoid is their official name.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“It’s on the Wikipedia page.”

“Does Wikipedia call the shots? I mean, I don’t see any reason we can’t just call them what they do in the movie.”

“Fine,” Dipper said. “We’re reviewing the Mushroom Men from _Murder Mushrooms_. First category, _Scariness_. I give them a four. They look a little creepy, but they move too slow to terrify and their weaknesses are lame. What do you think Doctor Mableton?”

“Well, Professor Dippingsauce,” Mabel said. “I think you’re way off. You’re forgetting about the most creepy part… the way they grow on your skin." She let loose with a shudder. "I’m going to give them a seven.”

Dipper bobbed his head back and forth, mulling over her point. It was a good one, but he didn’t feel like revising his score. “Next category, _Smash Potential_. Doctor Mableton?”

“I give them a two, I guess. They can grow to be pretty big, but they’re squishy. They’re can beat up people, but they won’t be knocking down any buildings. Unless they get upgrades in the sequel.”

“Agreed, two. Next category, _Kill Difficulty_. Here was my biggest problem with them, Doctor, their weakness is _fire_. That’s like the _first_ thing anybody should try when facing an unknown monster.”

“But they _are_ immune to bullets, and cutting them just makes them _spread_ ,” Mabel pointed out. “And, as the many sequels we’ve yet to watch illustrate, they’re almost impossible to totally eradicate. If a few spores survive, they come back.”

“Every monster comes back. What matters is how difficult it is to destroy them when they do. And the Myconoids…”

“Mushroom Men!”

“Right… the Mushroom Men are lightweights. I give them a two.”

“Five for me.”

“So, that brings us to our final category. _Total Threat Potential_?” 

“I’m going to have to give them a nine.” 

“A _nine_? Are you insane?" The scale had certain benchmarks. Level Zero was a joke, no real threat at all. Level One was that it could put individual people in danger, but that’s it. Five could terrorize a city. Level Eight could realistically cause the collapse of society, Level Nine meant they could potentially exterminate humanity, and Level Ten could destroy the whole planet. Everything in between were judgement calls. And if it wasn’t just potential, but almost certain, they got one level bumped up. If a monster would almost certainly cause the collapse of society but probably not exterminate humanity, it was rated a nine. But Dipper had to assume his sister was rating them on potential alone. "Fire kills them, Mabel. _Fire_.”

“Wow, you _really_ can’t get past that, can you? Yes, fire kills them, but not completely. And they spread from person to person. A few spores on the wind and boom, new outbreaks, sooner or later you get one you can’t contain, and you get the smart ones who infect more people. That, my good professor, is how you destroy the world…”

“No way, I’m giving them a six at highest. Local, containable biohazard. The spores don’t grow in the light.”

She shrugged. “Everywhere…” she yawned, although this time she didn’t try to finish what she was saying through it, “…gets dark eventually.”

“Well, I guess Doctor Mabelton and I will have to disagree on this one. But what did you think of the movie?”

She stuck her tongue out and blew out a raspberry while her thumb went down. “It’s like you said, boring.”

“Thumbs down for me too. That’s it for this time, join us next time…” he paused. There was no way they were going to have another movie. And this was a lark, something that might not be repeated. “If there is a next time,” he finished, then looked at Mabel, trying to divine something in her big beautiful eyes. But she just looked back at him, and he couldn’t tell if she was acknowledging that this was probably the last one, or wishing it wasn’t. So he finished, lamely, “Assuming, you know, we don’t all get taken over by the Mushroom Men…”

“Myconoids,” Mabel corrected.

“Myc…” He sputtered for a moment. “… What? You just said you didn’t like that name…”

She shrugged and grinned, a little glint in her eyes. “I changed my mind.”

And in doing so, made him lose his train of thought, but he looked back into the camera, shook his head, and said, “Goodnight.” Then he pressed the button to end the recording, and looked back to his sister. Off camera, a smile came more easily. “You were way too generous in the scores there.”

“I have to be, you’re too harsh. You think just because we’ve defeated things that were way worse back in Gravity Falls…" She hesitated. It was one of those weird things. They both knew all the weird stuff that had happened those summers there. They’d seen things that nobody would believe, been in more danger than any movie… but they almost never talked about it. Sometimes Dipper wondered if it was all in his imagination. At other times he thought their unwillingness to talk about it was, itself, some kind of magical effect, one more thing that prevented the town’s mysteries from becoming public knowledge. ”…that it’s not dangerous,“ she finished. "Okay, the Mushroom Men may not be very showy. But things that grow slowly in the dark… they can be just as dangerous as giant robots and candy monsters and carnivorous mole people. They can change everything.”

He had the strangest feeling like she meant something deep, profound, but he didn’t know how to ask about it. “Anyway, I guess a little conflict is good for the videos. If we ever were going to put them online.”

“Yeah,” she said, brightening up immediately, and whatever might or might not have been playing on her mind, it seemed to have vanished. “Although we might want to do a retake of _that_ one tomorrow. I’m pretty sure you screwed up once and called me Mabel.”

“Did I?” He shrugged. “I don’t know why we used those old names anyway." She called him Professor Dippingsauce when they made the first video on the spur of the moment, and he naturally fell in with her old alias. They were the ones they used when they were kids. Sometimes it was Mister Dippingsauce and Miss Mabelton, sometime it was Lord Dippingsauce and Lady Mabelton, sometimes they were Agents, sometimes they were Officers, Royalty, Captains, depending on where their imaginations would take them or, when they were actually trying to fool somebody, the needs of their alias, but they used the same names regularly. "We could have just been Professor and Doctor Pines.” Come to think of it… “Why _didn’t_ we ever have the same last names, anyway? Even when we weren’t pretending we weren’t siblings." Mabel was the one who first came up with them, long ago.

"Oh, that, well…” She actually blushed, deeply. “It’s stupid. You don’t want to know.”

Now he absolutely wanted to know. He nudged her with his shoulder. “What? Tell me.”

“It’s just… when we were _really_ little…” She was now, if possible, even redder.

“Yeah?”

It took a few more seconds for her to finally get it out. “I just thought we needed different names, so… we could one day get married.”

Of all the answers he’d considered while she was trying to get it out, this was not one of them. “…Married?”

She sounded defensive, maybe overly so. “I was _little_ , okay? Every good story had the hero and her dashing love interest get married at the end, and you were usually the only guy around when we were playing. I didn’t really get the reasons why that shouldn’t work.” She looked down, unwilling to look at him, like he might make fun of her.

“Relax, it’s no big deal. I did the same thing." And to a certain extent, still did have those fantasies.

"Really?”

“Sure. Besides, there’s plenty to be embarrassed about in our childhood. Remember some of our old costumes? Han and Leia?" That one was their parents idea, and they got some teasing for it from those kids that knew. They got more teasing when they dressed up at Link and Zelda in 8th grade. Some of the other kids thought it was way too hilarious that they were a couple… even though the characters were at that point never actually a couple in the official canon, just friends, although in some of the comics and cartoons they were more. The twins just shrugged it off, but ever since then they tried to avoid the more obvious couples costumes. "It doesn’t matter if it’s just pretend.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

Another awkward silence seemed to bloom. “Anyway, it’s getting pretty late. But… this was really fun. We should do this again.”

“We should. We should make a thing of this. Maybe not quite so many movies at once, but, like, one or two." She swung her legs off his bed, inadvertently knocking the popcorn bowl onto the floor. "Oops." She fell off the bed and onto her knees, trying to clean it up. 

Dipper put his laptop aside and leaned over the bed to observe the mess. They’d gone for the popcorn after the second movie, but wound up not eating much of it. They’d already had a quick dinner after the first movie ended, and regularly snacked on chocolate-covered cherries from the box Dipper bought (Mabel ate most of them). Most of the popcorn wound up uneaten when they realized they weren’t as hungry as they thought. Besides, there was that scene early in _Mushroom Men_ where the Myconoids were growing in the darkened movie theater… that was enough to turn them off popcorn for a while. Now they were scattered everywhere, not a single kernel stayed inside the bowl, though Mabel was trying to shovel them in. 

"Nice going,” he teased, but he got down and started to help clean it.

“It was an accident!”

“I know. Let’s just get it cleaned up.”

“There’s some under the bed…” she said. 

Dipper’s hands were full of bits of popcorn that were spilling out, and then noticed that Mabel was closer anyway. “So, grab it.”

“Nuh-uh, I’m not reaching under _there_ … who knows what might be growing under there. Or hidden under there. You might have, like, porn under there.”

His eyes rolled. What was this, the fifteen century? Porn was safely hidden on his computer. “There’s nothing under there,” he said. “But fine, I’ll clean up your mess..” He dumped what he had in the bowl and reached under. “I don’t want stale popcorn smell in here for the rest of my life.”

She laughed and snorted a little. “Please, in here, that’d be an improvement!”

He was pretty sure she was only teasing, but the joke made him worry nonetheless that there was a popcorn kernel of truth in it. Did his room smell? Well, of course it did, guys rooms were supposed to smell a little. And yes, there was a hamper in the corner which didn’t smell the best, but his mom put air freshener in the outlet a few times a week. He hoped all that remained is a pleasant manly undertone, rather than something offensive. Maybe it was just that he was used to it. 

It was probably just teasing… if it was really true, he figured, she probably wouldn’t say it like that, she’d take him aside quietly and suggest ways to improve it, or maybe spontaneously complain when she first walked in, depending on her mood. Or use it if they were in a real fight. But to joke about it would be meaner than he was used to. The appropriate thing to do would be tease her back, make a comment about her own room maybe, but hers smelled great, and he was tired and couldn’t think of anything… so he threw some popcorn at her head. 

It mostly landed in her hair, and she pulled one strand in front of her face, and there was a puffy white crumb clinging to it. “Oh, it’s _on_ , now…” She threw popcorn back at him, and he re-retaliated, and soon all their work cleaning was undone, and there were no big piles of popcorn suitable for throwing. But they were laughing the whole time, and Dipper was having loads of fun, so, when out of easy to throw things, his eyes went to his bed and fell on his pillow.

Mabel must have read his thoughts, because she stood and went for it at the same time he did, both of them crawling over the covers. Dipper got it first, but before he could secure it, Mabel’s fingers caught hold, and they were in a tug of war. 

Then she started fighting dirty, and with one free hand started tickling him. He kept hold of the pillow but began to squirm and desperately try to grab hold of her hand, and then, before long, they tumbled back to the ground, rolling toward a wall in what had turned into a wrestling match, the kind they used to have all the time as kids but had stopped when they hit their teen years.

When they stopped rolling, Mabel was on top of him. The pillow was on the ground beside him, but Mabel had his hands pinned with her own, staring down at him with a manic look on her face, breathing heavily.

And then he remembered the reason they hadn’t wrestled in years… she’d grown boobs. They were right in front of him. Not in a sweater, either… she was still wearing the dress she wore to the party, short with loose straps, one of which had fallen off her shoulder, making it all that much easier to look down her cleavage.

_No, don’t look, don’t look…_ he told himself. But he couldn’t help it. There it was. And she was on top of him. Right on top of him. 

Nothing happened for several seconds, except staring into each other’s eyes (although Dipper’s strayed) and deep breathing. And then she leaned forward, pressing her face close to his, and Dipper began hoping she couldn’t feel the part of him that was hard and pressing into something. He prayed it was only folds of her dress. “Dipper…” she said softly.

“Um…”

“STOP HORSING AROUND AND GO TO BED.” The shout came from far away but it felt obscenely close. It was a Dad shout, a tired Dad shout, from the master bedroom and it made them both twitch, and made Mabel pull away and let go of Dipper’s wrists, even though Dad hadn’t even opened the door. Mom and Dad had returned from their Valentine’s date night a couple hours ago and gone to bed shortly before the twins started watching the mushroom movie. Their play fight must have woken somebody up.

They’d both looked towards the hall when the shout started, but then looked back at each other. Mabel’s face was flush with color, and she said. “Yeah. I should go to bed. It is getting pretty late.”

“Okay,” Dipper whispered. “I’ll clean this up tomorrow.”

She nodded, mumbled, “Good night…” And climbed off of him, and then got to her feet and ran, mostly on her toes so as to minimize the sound, out of his room, not even looking back. 

He lay there on the floor, pressing his palm into his eyes, knowing Mabel was blushing way too much, she had to have felt… something. The night was going so well, and now it was going to be tainted. All because he couldn’t control his stupid feelings and his stupider body. Maybe stupidest of all was his brain, because there was a moment, just a moment, where he actually thought she might be about to kiss him. 

The best he could hope for is that they just never talked about it, they pretended it never happened. At worst… he could look back on this night as the curtain call of their easygoing relationship, one last bow and moment to shine before it slowly faded to black for good. From now on, every other encounter they had from then on could be tinged with awkwardness. He didn’t think their movie night would get any sequels anytime soon… she’d probably wind up avoiding him at least for a while. If she didn’t, he would… give her time to forget.

A half hour later, he dragged himself off the floor and plopped down in the bed, not even bothering to undress, and sure he wouldn’t be getting much sleep the way his brain was already tormenting him with what-ifs and what-I-should-have-dones. 

Oh well… at least it was no longer Valentine’s Day.

**The End**


End file.
